28 October 2018 1:49 AM

The burglars are at your door. And the police? Hiding in their office: How the balance of fear is shifting in Britain as criminals are no loner afraid of the law

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Britain today is like a ship, long ago holed deep beneath the waterline, which now begins to list alarmingly, as the sea starts to slop on to the deck.

In many parts of this country, the balance of fear is shifting. Criminals are not afraid of the police and the courts. Normal people are afraid of wrongdoers.

How long before this happens where you live?

And then, what use will your easily broken windows and easily kicked-in front door be, or your burglar alarms to which nobody will respond?

In London, where the horror of knife crime is now plainly out of control, police are failing hopelessly in their efforts to catch and prosecute the culprits, even where there are living witnesses who could identify the men who tried to kill them. But they dare not do so.

As Sarah Jones, a Labour MP who heads Parliament’s all-party group on knife crime, says: ‘What’s particularly shocking is the growing number of offences where the police identified a suspect but they weren’t prosecuted because the victim did not support further action. This suggests a serious problem with victims feeling too afraid or mistrustful to testify.’

I would guess that this goes a lot further.

Many of us who have had dealings of one kind or another with the modern police suspect that, if we go to them, they will probably manage to mess up the case, ably assisted by the CPS, while also giving our full personal details to the suspect.

Even if they get it right, the criminal will be ‘spared jail’ by a feeble judge. Simpler to let it go.

And so the figures of recorded crime have a very distant relationship to actual crime. If there’s no insurance to be claimed, why bother?

Most of us reluctantly recognise that things which were once restrained by the law – general low-level nastiness, vandalism, public drunkenness, illegal drugs – have now been decriminalised by stealth.

The problem is that almost nobody in politics, or the media, or the police, is remotely interested in why this has happened or how to put it right.

The police themselves are like BT, or one of the other monster monopolies, which view the public as a nuisance.

The Police Federation is just another public service union, whose solution to everything is more taxpayers’ cash. But a lingering sentimentality stops us seeing this.

We used to like and respect the police, and we wish we still did, so we are more easily fooled by them than by any other lobby.

Take the current moaning about how their almost complete failure to enforce the laws against burglary, drunk driving, and drug possession is caused by a shortage of officers.

This is not true.

Police strengths are down a bit from their 2009 peak (was that an especially crime-free year?) but are significantly higher than they were in the days when all forces managed to patrol the streets.

The problem is that the police are doing the wrong thing.

Think about it. Please. What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he or she can do first aid?

If your life has been ruined by a drunken driver, or a motorist texting while driving, he cannot unruin that life. He cannot restore the irrevocably lost mental health of the teen who has smoked marijuana.

The best he can do is, with a lot of luck, arrange for the criminals involved to do a bit of community service, or be sentenced to a fine they won’t actually pay.

His job was to prevent these things from happening, by being a visible, patrolling presence in every town and village.

But he has stopped doing this.

The beats he used to walk long ago vanished. The police stations, hundreds of them, were sold off. So were the police houses. The police road patrols became a rarity.

The modern police deride these simple, effective methods. They claim they cannot halt cybercrime or terrorism or domestic abuse.

Well, this would be a good argument if the modern police methods of hiding in remote office blocks or driving about chatting to each other, worked any better.

But they do not.

I am astonished that the debate on this subject continues at this ignorant, partisan level.

It is as if the captain and his first lieutenant were arguing, on the bridge, about the menu for dinner, while the ship went down by the bows.

Corbynites may love the new film Peterloo, about the indefensible massacre, in 1819, of unarmed Englishmen and women by drunken, stupid soldiers under the command of dolts.

If Left-wing speeches are your thing, there is no shortage of them in this drama, which seemed to me to last slightly longer than the Hundred Years War.

The final scenes of slaughter are, by contrast, powerfully moving.

But the whole point of Peterloo is that it was the middle classes who publicised it, using that great invention, the newspaper, and denounced it, and sought the reforms which ensured that the voice of the people would be heard and heeded in the land, without bloodshed.

I feel great sympathy for the old soldiers now being dragged from their retirement by officious detectives to face investigations about long ago events in Northern Ireland.

Soldiers are owed the total loyalty of the Crown, which sent them into danger and demanded their disciplined obedience.

But I feel no sympathy with most of the soppy politicians now raising their cases and bleating about how unfair it all is.

For these politicians continue to pretend that our abject crawling to IRA gangsters (and ‘Loyalist’ gangsters, too) in Belfast in 1998 was a benevolent, happy peace deal.

It was not. It was a capitulation.

Which is why it is we who withdrew our forces, and we who hauled down our flags and ceded our territory (it will pass to Dublin’s control quite soon).

Our lawless enemies kept their guns and bombs, rose to power, and dined at Windsor Castle.

And it is our soldiers who face police inquiries, while hundreds of grisly terrorists were released from well-earned prison sentences, and hundreds more promised that their bloody crimes are forgotten.

How strange it is that a country which admires Churchill’s defiance of a wicked and mighty enemy applauds our surrender to a small, criminal gang.

Unlike those who rushed to conclusions about alleged gas attacks in Syria, without bothering with evidence, I have waited till it is beyond reasonable doubt that the Saudi regime murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, on their own premises, using their own state- paid hoodlums.

And now I can say this to our Government, and to the warlike media voices and MPs of all parties who have postured over the undoubted wickedness of Russia and Syria: You are hypocrites. Your moralising is all phoney.

Because, as we will see in the years to come, the many barbarities of the Saudi regime will not lead to sanctions, or bombing raids or missiles or mass expulsions of diplomats.

Nor will the increasingly obvious aggression and despotism of our other great friends, the Chinese.

These killers and tyrants will still be welcome at Buckingham Palace. And this does not really bother you.

So it is obvious that we, as a country, can be bought, and actually have no morals.

And so either your outrage against Syria and Russia is a pose to make you look better than you are; or you do not know what you are talking about; or you have other, less creditable reasons for seeking conflict with these countries.

That is now established.

*******

'Short Breaks in Mordor' A collection of my reports from places you need to know about but probably don't want to visit - E.g. Pyongyang, Baghdad, Minsk, Teheran, Cairo, Katanga, Mandalay, Deoband, Peshawar, Baku and Tashkent - is now available as a paperback here

As has been said before, the point about the past being a foreign country is that they did things differently there, and the historical relationship between the pope and the king of England in the 12th century seems counter-intuitive today.

Perhaps we should now have a referendum on whether or not NI reverts back to Eire..No doubt it would be a 'close call but it might solve the brexit farce.We missed the boat a long time ago when we might have been one of the founders rather than also ..rans and I think we shall suffer in the long run even though the decision of the people was brave.I cannot blame the police nowadays for not running personal risks and I cannot envisage the type of person who would go to war as so many k.ids did in ww2 to fight for a society determined to make them 2nd class citizens with it'sintolerance.I would imagine a revolution if call-up ever came back.This country will get more and more pc because the world cannot cope even if it had the will to do so,with the ..top echelon of societ.y Another windfall for them in the budget.Everybody has just given up.

Michael Hills: "The implied assertion is that the innocent people (and I stress here innocent people) who were killed unlawfully at the hands of British soldiers, and there were many such people, are not worthy of judicial redress."

Nothing of the kind. What British citizens cannot abide is a policy of bringing the full weight of the law to bear on British servicemen for alleged crimes while IRA terrorists go free. What 'judicial redress' would their be exactly for the victims of such horrific atrocities as Deal barracks 1989 or Teebane 1992 in the event of suspects being identified and charged? If the Hyde Park atrocity of 1982 is anything to go by then not very much, and if forgive & forget (etc) is to be the order of the day where the 'peace process' is concerned then I've yet to hear one good argument why one particular sub-set of people must be a special exception to the rule.

Correction - one reason might be that rather ominous warning we keep being given by our politicians and the media that this or that could derail / threaten / endanger the 'peace process', an apparent admission that SF/IRA are still reserving the right to start bombing and shooting again should they ever find that things are not going quite their way. Of course, solitary elderly ex-squaddies don't command the same level of menace and are therefore fair game; I dare say from their perspective the 'peace process' is looking like a pretty one-sided affair, as doubtless the war process we call The Troubles did when they were made to walk the streets like sitting ducks for terrorist bombs and bullets.

A.N.Wilson wrote that it's not that the country has changed since The Queen's accession but in fact the nation of 1952 has ceased to exist. Lately I've wondered if England (I don't know enough of the other parts of Britain) should change its name. It has no connection to its past except as a tourist attraction, the crime issue mentioned is an example of how far the country has sunk and free speech is becoming a distant memory.

**The author is convinced that Britain will hand Northern Ireland over to Dublin quite soon ;…. I believe whoever is British Prime Minister at the time it happens if it does - under whatever circumstances, he or she won't recover from it.**
As it 'happens' – the person actually responsible for surrendering Northern Ireland is a former prime minister - Anthony Blair QC, and he seems to be doing very well out of it and well recovered from his blatant treachery basking in his multimillion-pound property empire, EU handouts and speech circuit paychecks.

Did it? It sounds to me more like a throwaway line from a struggling comic. I mean, I don't know when it was said, but as a user of public libraries for over seventy years your saying is certainly not one I've heard before.

And who was it complaining to the police about being called names that caused the shenanigans you describe so vividly?

Michael Wood writes: "I think you will find that the *majority* in this 'society' of ours still holds very Christian views [...]"

- Possibly, however, I was referring to certain views held by conservative Christians (this contributor seems to have omitted the word "conservative" when quoting from my post), such as opposition to same-sex marriage, opposition to abortion, preference for sexual abstinence etc, which have become minority opinions in today's society.

Adelecinander: ***In the 12th century gave the king of England power to conquer Ireland***

Well, he was an English - the only English - pope. Plus papal infallibility does not extend to what today would be called geopolitical questions. If it did Catholics would be obliged to celebrate the triumph of the Orangeist cause in 1688-1690 - as the reigning pope of the day did.

When I watched the Moon landing in 1969, the police were always on the streets to reinforce what was expected of good community behaviour.
It was part of the preventative policing, that helped negate the need for today's, "response policing".
Thinking back to childhood, when we often didn't have a phone in the house, we did get a "party line" when I hit secondary and so no chance of the immature sending sexts or a pouty pose, or bully or be bullied and if we kept social media and I phones and video games and young from viewing so much gang or music inducing gang crime ......just a thought, they might have loads for time for protecting the householders from burglary, the rise in sexual harassment on the street.
Think of all those police hours my generation used to save our bobbies.
The very generation that wasn't so demanding on modern day policing.

It used to be said that if you heard wailing sirens, flashing blue lights, screeching car tyres and helicopters circling overhead it was likely to be that someone had been cornered with an overdue library book. Now it seems that someone reporting that they have been called names can arouse such a police reaction. Whilst Rome burns…

Henry L'Eplattenier "...….Christians who are quick to claim that they are being persecuted, simply because their views are no longer shared by the majority in our modern society, and people are not afraid to express their disagreement."

I think you will find that the *majority* in this 'society' of ours still holds very Christian views even if many are, like me, not too keen to pay homage to the state's lukewarm organised Churches.
Christ doesn't place His followers in one basket and your Christ-free 'modern society' has already failed without Him.

Once again Peter Hitchens is correct in his article -The burglars are at your door.
Yet it is not the fault of serving front-line officers who do their best. The fault lies clearly at the door of the offices where their bosses hide.
Police are about Policing. Being proactive has long disappeared and why ? Running around dealing with non Police matters, creating self serving units to deal with minority crimes, painting their nails to 'join in' with some worthy cause or worrying about the intake of BME applicants and their position in The Stonewall index.
Policing is lost, completely lost unless a back to basics approach is adopted

Archaeologists always had a problem with the "celtic" invasion. Genetics is making such invasions even more problematic. It turns out just about every population tested is a mixture of a mixture of a mixture...

Talking of which, were the Protestant settlers tested to see if they were gaels?

**The burglars are at your door. And the police? Hiding in their office: How the balance of fear is shifting in Britain…**

This can’t be by coincidence or by chance it even highly unlikely that the average policeman feels at ease with his conscience at this blatant ‘turn a blind eye’ policy towards criminality. This goes all the way to the top passing by the likes of Commissioner Dick who gave the order to hold police back in stations during serious social disruption and the Lord Mayor Khan who casually says, words to the effect, that bombings are part and parcel of a major city.
I was woken during the night by the noise of burglars in my property - they left as they heard me coming downstairs and I phoned the police who told me they couldn’t come for about 4 hours as they were very busy (the nearest station was less than 2 miles away). I then got in my car and scoured the streets hoping to catch the culprits. The police did indeed turn up 4 hours later but offered nothing. On checking very sources about significant criminal activity in the district there was no mention. Also, I had a neighbour who put their home up for sale of £230K and a gentleman turned up with a carrier bag (in which he said there was £200k) and aggressively demanded that they take his offer because it was ‘cash’. My neighbour would have contacted the police had this been an Anglo Saxon walking the streets with this amount of money but at the risk of being accused something by the police or more frighteningly being at risk for reporting the matter and being on the receiving end of repercussions from the potential buyer – so they kept quiet.
I’ve heard and read reports of it happening in the military where troops are held back at base to ‘keep everyone safe’ and even servicemen on active duty in remote outposts told to ‘restrain fire’ to save ammunition and cut costs!!
Ultimately those on the lawless side are reasonably safe from disruption and this can only mean that the growth of their numbers becomes more rapid and then before long it outweighs the decent law-abiding members of the society and the country ends up, as we are already seeing in many cities. like the back alleys of Karachi or the Brazilian favelas.

I found Peter's observations on policing here match a lot of my own experiences where it felt like reporting a crime that the police didn't really want to know and it felt like I was under interrogation. It was quite at variance with the TV programme where the officers are mainly scrupulously polite with abusive criminals caught in the acts that they encounter,

When I was threatened and menaced with a beating in broad daylight in a town centre, no one came to my aid even though the group was circling around me like vultures around their prey. The security guard at the supermarket where I had ran for my life seemed annoyed by my breathless pleas for help and said he would look outside for the culprits but he never returned even after 20 minutes. I rang the non emergency police line and there was a pleasant sounding policeman who gave me some advice and a crime number.

I gave a statement later at a police station which was no longer in full use 10 miles away. The statement was taken by a bored looking officer who prior to it said nothing would likely happen in any case. He was right, nothing did. It depended on which way the CCTV cameras were pointed, as I was told in a follow up call from a friendly Detective Sargeant.

The other side of the coin was also mentioned by Peter on what happens when they do prosecute an offender. Ironically, I read this before posting here that a convicted burglar was 'spared jail'. The mitigation said that he was a 'kind, helpful, young man' and the judge said he was very lucky to be given a suspended sentence. As noted, the house can't be unransacked from top to bottom, the stolen items that were never recovered, unstolen. The car stolen by the kind, young man in the burglary only remained unstolen thanks to a tracker device that led the police to the kind etc. man.

This is related to why the police are at times as jaundiced as they are - what's the point of making the effort?

“By then, Mr. Sayoc was an enthusiastic bodybuilder, Ms. Villasana said; once she opened her grandmother’s refrigerator and found what she believed was Mr. Sayoc’s stash of steroids.”PH: Yes. I mentioned the steroids. ***

The author is convinced that Britain will hand Northern Ireland over to Dublin quite soon ; there is definitely an air that it might come about but the six counties don't belong to the Westminster Government as many seem to think they do. I believe whoever is British Prime Minister at the time it happens, if it does - under whatever circumstances, he or she won't recover from it.

Posted by: James | 28 October 2018 at 12:41 PM:
-"Ireland belongs to the Irish, Peter. I vigorously agree with you on most things and indeed I look to you on any panel as usually the sole voice of reason but I reject your continued claims of some kind of rightful ownership on my land. Your country was not invited into Ireland [...] and we had to bend the knee to a foreign crown with all its trappings.[...] The Irish people did no less but for some reason are still viewed by some as "occupiers" of their own country."-

In 300 BC, the original Neolithic inhabitants of the island were themselves conquered by an invading Aryan people who imposed their Celtic speech upon the whole of it.

In the 12th century the pope gave the king of England power to conquer Ireland.

As with similar conflicts around the world, seeming difference is between communities of actually closely related people with recent shared ancestry only separated by chance historical cultural religious notions which are entirely *made up*.

Protestants of Northern Ireland derived from returned descendants of Irish emigrants previously settled in Scotland.

The change of religion in the interim - (as with Palestinians who descended from Jews) - being a consequence of a chance accident of history.

As a Northern Ireland unionist and someone who suffered both as an individual and in my family at the hands of the IRA I have to say I am angry at the attitude of people in the rest of the UK toward the investigation of soldiers who may have committed crimes during their time in Northern Ireland.

The implied assertion is that the innocent people (and I stress here innocent people) who were killed unlawfully at the hands of British soldiers, and there were many such people, are not worthy of judicial redress. It is a classic example of what was wrong with the status of Northern Ireland nationalists (I am not a nationalist), they must be subject to British rule but should not expect the rights of British citizens, they must obey British laws but not expect British justice.

As an upholder of British rule and a believer in British justice, if British soldiers committed murder of British citizens in a part of the United Kingdom then those soldiers must be investigated and brought before the courts, British justice demands no less.

No, the Good Friday Agreement does not come into it (quite apart from anything else the British Army was not party to the GFA), any British soldier convicted of a crime and imprisoned at that time would also have been released. But no British soldier was serving any such sentence!

As someone who loathes the IRA and the Loyalists terrorists I have to say without compunction the greatest terrorist atrocity committed during the Troubles was Bloody Sunday. Why? Because it was carried out by agents of the British state. For upholders of British law to massacre without compunction British citizens in a British city demanding the same rights as their fellow British citizens is an atrocity that calls out to the heavens for retribution.

No believer in British justice and law and no one who believes the people of Northern Ireland are equal British citizens deserving of equal British treatment could feel otherwise.

In response to your question, did Churchill offer a united Ireland to de Valera in return for joining the Allied war effort. Churchill made a statement which could be interpreted that way, but was not explicit or unambiguous. De Valera didn't believe he was trustworthy, so rebuffed the approach. He was probably right.

Martin writes: "Assumptions, assumptions dear boy. And there you have it, by this very sentence you have revealed your own intolerance and the bog-standard position adopted by all so-called 'liberals' in which they immediately try to find a race or identity angle from which to attack their opponent rather than tackling what they say. I don't care if he's a clown on a unicycle riding across Westminster Bridge. I'm sure that if he was a Christian' he would probably not try to claim that he had been a victim of Christianophobia if you made a valid criticism of his religion. It goes with the territory."

- If this contributor had actually read what I wrote, rather than accusing me of intolerance, he would have noticed that I have in fact not attacked Brian Meredith for who he is, but simply pointed out that his claim that conservatives are "inoffensive" is very much a subjective point of view. Christians may not use the word "Christianophobia", but there are many conservative Christians who are quick to claim that they are being persecuted, simply because their views are no longer shared by the majority in our modern society, and people are not afraid to express their disagreement.

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